molecules

Revolutionizing Lab Proteins for Food and Medicine: How Prolific Machines’ $55M Series B is Illuminating a New Path to Growth

Prolific Opto Hood 2024
Two years ago, Prolific Machines unveiled its technology for a unique manufacturing approach to grow cells for industries, including cultivated meat. In addition, cell growth is hard to optimize because it’s not in a format that machines can understand. “For the last few decades, the way that we’ve been controlling cells is with molecules,” Kent said. We add these molecules into the bioreactors and hope for the best.”Prolific Machines’ protein manufacturing bioreactor (Image credit: Prolific Machines) Image Credits: Prolific Machines /Prolific Machines believes it has a way of transitioning away from these molecules to something better: light. It includes convertible notes and brings Prolific Machines’ total funding to date to $86.5 million.

Isomorphic Inks Strikes Drug Discovery Deals with Eli Lilly and Novartis

Isomorphic Labs
Isomorphic Labs, the London-based, drug discovery-focused spin-out of Google AI R&D division DeepMind, today announced that it’s entered into strategic partnerships with two pharmaceutical giants, Eli Lilly and Novartis, to apply AI to discover new medications to treat diseases. Isomorphic will receive $45 million upfront from Eli Lilly and potentially up to $1.7 billion based on performance milestones, excluding royalties. Researchers recently used AlphaFold to design and synthesize a potential drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of primary liver cancer. The latest version of AlphaFold can generate predictions for nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank, the world’s largest open access database of biological molecules, DeepMind announced in late October. Already, Isomorphic is applying the new AlphaFold model, which it co-designed with DeepMind, to therapeutic drug design, helping to characterize different types of molecular structures important for treating disease.